Oliver Sacks 1989 interview

In case you missed the news, the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks passed away over the weekend. I’ve been thinking about a post about him for a few days now but wasn’t quite sure how to frame it.

My interest in Sacks comes from the fact that he explained neurological anomalies in a way that humanized the people he was talking about. He didn’t exploit his subjects; he shared their stories with us to take the scariness away from different ways of being human. During the time I was coming to terms with my own learning disabilities (dyslexia, ADHD) reading Sacks’ books and these stories were a comfort to me.

I’m really glad the folks at the NewsHour dug up this piece and no doubt had to digitize it to get it up on youTube. It’s a treasure.

At the end of the piece, Jim Lehrer mentions that the Sacks book Awakenings is being turned into a movie. That movie came out in 1990 and was fantastic. It starred the late Robin Williams as Oliver Sacks. Here’s the trailer:

Makes me sad that both of these people are now gone. Two brilliant folks.

About Richard

I’ve been publishing online in one form or another since the early days of the web. I started this site in 2003 with a self-hosted install of WordPress and more recently migrated most of the old content here.

This site primarily features photography but I’m interested in many things and you’ll see an occasional video embed or story here as well.

I use Flickr to host my photography, some of which is embedded here. I also embed other Flickr members’ work as I find and want to share it further than Flickr.